Tagged as Elitist, Obama Shifts Campaign From High-Flown to Folksy

Senator Barack Obama at the Blue Coffee Cafe on Monday in Durham, N.C., has been working to reframe his candidacy in the days before Tuesdays primaries.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

EVANSVILLE, Ind. — With sleeves rolled up and folksy on his mind, Barack Obama stepped into the Evansville Labor Temple — a highbrow name for a barlike haunt where the walls are adorned with photos of Nascar drivers, basketball schedules and a poster celebrating the 75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition. Mr. Obama slapped backs and ambled over to a mountainous breakfast buffet long on grease.

“I’ve been losing weight on this campaign,” he announced. “I hope there are some biscuits and grits.”

A bricklayer type offered, “Gravy?”

Mr. Obama replied, “Hey, I’m trying to fatten up, right?”

Right.

For the last 10 days leading up to Tuesday’s primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, Mr. Obama’s campaign has unfolded against a choreographed backdrop of factory floors and farmsteads, dinner tables and diners. He has talked less often of the audacity of hope and more often of the anxieties of middle-class Americans, while throwing in allusions to Nascar, fatty foods and beer, and playing the occasional game of basketball.

Like his opponent, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama is intent on tracking that prized prey known as the white working-class voter. This year, Mr. Obama appeared to unlock the key to that demographic, taking the white male vote in Maryland, Virginia and Wisconsin and scoring well among union households, according to voter surveys.

But then came Mr. Obama’s stinging defeats in Ohio and Pennsylvania, as Mrs. Clinton mined the working-class vote to great effect, resuscitating her candidacy.

“She effectively defined herself and made him look more elitist like Dukakis and Kerry,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic Party consultant who has studied this demographic. “He’s trying to swim back to the center, but now the buoy keeps moving on him.”

This has confounded Mr. Obama, who worked as a community organizer in broken-down Chicago neighborhoods where the steel industry was once king. Substantively, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton share nearly identical positions on the home foreclosure crisis, on job training and trade, and on taxes.

After his defeat in Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama huddled with his advisers and talked about how to portray himself — on television and in newspapers — in Indiana and North Carolina.

Mr. Obama has acknowledged that he has created more than a few of his own problems. In San Francisco last month, he told fund-raisers that government and industry had betrayed small-town voters, who out of bitterness often clung to guns and religion and anti-immigrant sentiments. Then his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., reappeared, and with his radical political statements stirred more unease among white working-class voters.

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Senator Barack Obama at breakfast with union members in Indiana on Monday.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

But the candidate’s aides seem convinced that Mr. Obama’s problems take root more in image than in a deeper misunderstanding of working-class voters.

Mr. Obama began speaking of his frustration as he stood in the parking lot of a Joe’s Junction convenience store in Indianapolis as the Indiana campaign geared up. His opponents, he acknowledged, have turned him into something of a “caricature” over the last few weeks.

“One of the ironies of the last two or three weeks was this idea that somehow Michelle and I are elitist, pointy-headed intellectual types,” he said, referring to his wife.

“The fact is Michelle and I, our lives — if you look back over the last two decades — more closely approximate the lives of the average voter than any other candidate. We struggled with paying student loans, we tried to figure out how to make sure that we got adequate day care, I filled up my own gas tanks.”

Mr. Obama’s struggle to capture working-class votes also raises some unanswered questions, not least the role played by racial perceptions. Many millions of whites have voted for Mr. Obama over the course of the primaries, but his percentage of that vote has dropped noticeably in recent contests.

“You have a fair number of voters who are ambivalent on race,” said Rosalee A. Clawson, an associate professor of political science at Purdue University in Indiana. “They have positive views on some aspects of race, but their negative views can be activated by something like the Reverend Wright controversy. It gives them a reason to vote against him.”

Mr. Obama has more than a touch of the jock in him, working out daily and playing basketball whenever he can. But in matters of personal style, he is a formalist; he favors dress shirts and is reluctant to shed his jacket. He has altered that, too, in recent days.

Last week he tugged that necktie loose and sat at a kitchen table with Mike and Cheryl Fischer in their ranch house in Beech Grove, Ind. Sharing a lunch of Subway sandwiches and potato chips, they talked about his background and theirs, and about possible layoffs at Amtrak’s local shop where Mr. Fischer worked as a machinist.

“What would be the options if it did close?” Mr. Obama said. “Is there anybody hiring machinists?”

Less than a week later, Mr. Fischer found himself on a stage — before a large audience, standing next to a teleprompter — introducing Mr. Obama as he delivered a speech intended to reframe his candidacy on the final weekend of the Indiana campaign. The message was implicit: If Mr. Obama could connect with Mr. Fischer, couldn’t everyone else?

The answer to that question is not yet answered.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Tagged as Elitist, Obama Shifts Campaign From High-Flown to Folksy. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe